L. Baron et al., LABELED, TYPED LINKS AS CUES WHEN READING HYPERTEXT DOCUMENTS, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 47(12), 1996, pp. 896-908
Citations number
31
Categorie Soggetti
Information Science & Library Science","Information Science & Library Science","Computer Science Information Systems
This article examines the classification of link types within hypertex
t databases. Do labeled links act as cues, enabling understanding of t
he structure and leading to more informed navigational choices? Althou
gh there is anecdotal evidence that indicating link types to readers i
s useful in hypertext systems, there is little experimental data to su
pport this position. This study tries to provide an experimental basis
for the development of labels identifying link types. It addresses wh
ether labeling the different types of links affects hypertext searchin
g by providing or enhancing a structure for readers of nonlinear texts
. An experiment was run to determine which of the following three cond
itions serve users with better cues and lead to increased performance
in both browsing and querying scenarios: 1) Providing only organizatio
nal links; 2) Adding unlabeled semantic, rhetorical, and pragmatic lin
ks in addition to the organizational links; and 3) Adding labeled sema
ntic, rhetorical, and pragmatic links to the organizational links. The
experiment used a between subjects design where subjects were library
science students. SuperBook was used as the hypertext platform and th
e OCLC Cataloguing Users' Guide was used as the hypertext document. Th
e statistical results indicate that there was no significant differenc
e between the three conditions in the browsing task. However, subjects
who had labeled content-based links performed significantly better on
the querying task.